Galleria Massimodeluca presents the exhibition which ends its first artist-in-residence experience – an innovative project which has combined both private and exhibition spaces for one month and which will become an annual event. Ten or so works are on display which demonstrate the creative exchange between the two artists

(Mestre, 27 July 2015) Galleria Massimodeluca presents darsena residency #1, the exhibition at the end of the residency of Barbara Prenka and Orianne Castel, the two young artists who have lived and worked at the via Torino venue for one month, from 8 June to 8 July 2015 (from 25 September to 30 October 2015, inauguration on Thursday 24 September at 7 p.m.). The exhibition, just like the residency, has been organised by C.a.r.e Project(Contemporary Art Residence Experience), three young like-minded curators who graduated from AplusA, School for Curatorial Studies Venice: Maddalena Di Caprio, Giulia Favaron and Anna Miotto. About ten works are on show, all created by Prenka and Castel during their month of residency.

The innovative project sponsored by Galleria Massimodeluca, whose exhibition space has been shared as a place to both live and work, will become a fixed annual event and so the first end-of-residency exhibition has received a new, permanent name: darsena residency #1, which the artistic director of the Galleria, Marina Bastianello came up with. “The dockyard is a home of work, a workshop, the place where craft are not only built and repaired but also rest - explains Bastianello – just as the Galleria is a space for public relations and activities, but during the residency also becomes a dwelling. And the actual venue looks out onto a dockyard, in this area where the mainland and the lagoon meet, which is one of the reasons why it was decided to open Massimodeluca here”.

The exhibition, with one complete room dedicated to each artist, is the result of an artist residency project which has generated an interesting fusion between two different ways of working. “It could be said that for Barbara and Orianne it was a meeting in the dark, a sort of blind date, because they were two perfect strangers when they took up residency – explain the C.a.r.e Project curators - Barbara lives in Venice and studies at the Academy of Fine Arts; she uses different materials in her work which features a personal and introspective pictorial style. Orianne is French and is studying philosophy at Lyon; her works are mostly open installations that relate to the environment. As with every experience of cohabitation, the relationship can result in a productive cooperation or take completely independent paths. In this case, despite the differences in artistic expression and maybe because they are of the same generation and similar in character, the two artists discovered that they had many things in common and stimulated each other to push beyond their respective experimental boundaries”.

More specifically, during her residency Barbara Prenka continued the series of erased paper collages, which she has lately concentrated on and which have become a feature of her artistic production. During the residency she refined and evolved this technique, which consists of destructuring the pictorial sign through erasure strokes, cut-out, trimming and re-composition, before developing a second type of works in which she acts directly on the canvas she has painted, cut and sewn together using a sewing machine. The result is a work made up of modulated fragments reorganised into a new order. There will be some of her latest collages on show as well as the new works, some of which are also very large.

Orianne Castel has continued to analyse the grid concept, which lies at the basis of most of her works. For Castel the grid is a place of construction, of openness and not closure: that is why the materials she uses come from the building sector. She drew inspiration for the project at the Massimodeluca gallery from the industrial landscape which lies in front of the Galleria and worked with three measuring instruments that are used in the building trade: the line marker, the plumb line and the measuring square. Her project plays on concepts of regularity and precision, intrinsic peculiarities of the grid, and consists of six plasterboard panels and a wall installation which encases the entire exhibition room.

In addition to the texts by C.a.r.e Project the exhibition catalogue will contain contributions by Elena Forin and Daniele Capra, the curators who held the two talks which enlivened the darsena residency #1 programme, as well as the collectors Marco Ghigi and Giorgio Fasol.

Barbara Prenka (Gjakova, 1990) is currently studying for a master’s degree in Visual Arts at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts. Her artistic research is expressed through introspective techniques as she digs deep into her experience with memories, recollections and legacies. Her refined pictorial style is characterised by the use of papers, objects, photographs, fabrics and pigments. She lives and works in Venice.

Orianne Castel (Lyon, 1989) is a French artist. She is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts and is currently studying philosophy. The themes of her work are urban development and, more specifically, planning processes, looking into the discrepancies between these process and the actual use inhabitants make of their cities. She uses building materials such as iron and cement in her installations.